Me, Myself, and ...

Many years ago, a few days into a new job, I was getting to know a handful of coworkers when the subject of Only Children came up. We were a small public relations office on the frontlines for a desperately beleaguered larger institution, so on the occasion of my arrival we were taking more than the usual time to bond, like soldiers. Sitting together, drinking coffee, talking for hours while waiting for the battles ahead. We hadn't gotten to family histories in the long, deep conversation yet. But I looked around, decided these people were A-OK, and deemed it safe to pronounce, "All the Only Children I have ever known were completely socially inept."

This did not sit well with one of us who, come to find out, was an only child. Man oh man, he was touchy touchy.

Time is a teacher. By the time I left that institution several years later, I had learned that the Only Child situation was far worse than I had ever thought. Some people with no siblings could be virtually crippled by their inabilities to get along with others, to cope in team projects, or to have the spotlight swing off of them even briefly. I was astounded by the lengths to which some Only Children could go for attention.

* * *

The purpose of this story is to illustrate "why I hate writing in the first-person," at the very same moment I am announcing that henceforth, I will be embracing the first person in this blog! Well, maybe not “embracing”  --  more like fully engaging in the exposure therapy. Up to now I’ve loathed it and I think it shows. If blogs are going to be so conducive to this particular point of view, though, I need to quit delivering it with the ambivalence of a housewife bringing a Jello salad mold to the table. (She might be smiling, but inwardly she's wondering what she was thinking when she stirred pecans, cottage cheese, celery and pistachio pudding into the same bowl, and then expected them to hold together in a fish shape. Awfully easy to screw up, for a recipe that looks like congealed vomit and nobody likes in the first place.)

How easy is it, to screw up the first person? Let me count the ways.

1) You can really step in shit, as I did in that PR office so long ago. This is something a little more forgivable (or at the very least, forgettable) when speaking off the cuff. It's a little known fact that in Journalism 101, however, the first rule taught to fledgling writers is, "Do not step in shit for no good reason."

2) It's the trickiest of all Points of View to write, often coming off as self-centered at best, or desperately needy of a constant spotlight. With the exception of bad seeds, I like for people to like me. I don’t want them to wish to slap me, if they have to endure one more moment inside my brain.

3) Don't we have enough of narcissism in our culture already? Really  --  Facebook status updates are surely all anyone needs of me.

4) Worst of all, first-person is frighteningly revealing. Much safer to report a story in the third-person, rather than deliver your Jello mold stark naked, the word "I" sprinkled liberally throughout the dish in case anyone missed who is responsible for the mess. Plus -- for good measure -- some stories from your own personal life stirred in, the better to piss off people you actually know.

* * *

I am aware of the irony of the story that opened this blog, and that some percentage of readers will be Only Children. I trust they've cursed me mightily all the way to now, but that is precisely my point. Time is a teacher -- and some students need a lot of it. Maybe they ought not to be writing first-person until they are good and old, sticking with simple, factual reporting instead. I needed about ten more years to see the flaw in my logic about Only Children, beginning with the fact that undoubtedly, I had many perfectly normal acquaintances whose sibling status was not known to me. I needed personal experience:  when I remarried, I discovered an only child in my new husband’s family was one of the most well-balanced, likable, Zen-like fellows a person could know. Really -- I'm not just saying that so that when someday he is, indeed, rich and famous, he includes me in his will. Though that would be OK, too.

Oh well. Skin to the wind.




* Written with insincerest apologies to everyone who loves Jello molds.

Button Your Lip, Baby, Button Your Clothes

Evidence from a previous year, that it usually works out!

The landscape of this writer's inner life has been suffering epic drought. I spent several days down with the flu, too pathetic to even hold up a book. And passing from what I complained was near-death to blissed-out-but-Jello-like near-health has almost been scary, from a writing perspective:  pfft  --  no ideas to write about, and not so much as a phrase of inspiration whatsoever. Every line was like pulling my own teeth, the result, complete garbage. I've heard of lightning strikes changing the brain chemistry of their human targets altogether  --  personalities, speech patterns and accents, everything  --  and I'm a little worried a virus can do the same.

Or maybe it's just due to the change in the weather, and the biorhythm shifts that come with it. In any case, in the last week or so, Doug and I began our annual ritual of getting ready for the garden in earnest, and nearly murdering each other over it. Straight rows, or curved? Tried-and-true traditional methods, or strike out with some new idea that hasn't been thought up in the last 10,000 years of agriculture? Plant winter squash even if "one" of us hates them mightily? (Perhaps you can see which sides I am on.)

We're not the only couple for whom the first step toward fall harvest is spring hand-to-hand combat. About now, asking in bewilderment "What is it with the garden?" is as much a rite among vegetable-gardening wives as falling on our knees and weeping with gratitude in front of the first daffodil. Best I can figure, the garden is marital territory much like planning to have children, with the added fuel of actually getting to choose which genetics go into the living being that will be created. Not to mention planning in advance for the care of this "perfect" genetic specimen. That's a topic for a different blog, and a different blogger  --  one with some actual expertise in psychology.

The hardest fought battles end up being the most dearly beloved partnerships. This will be good to bear in mind later, when fights over the garden will be in the actual garden, and we're likely to be holding sharp, long-handled tools. For now, we're back on track. In sexist roles, and I am A-OK with that. Doug set up the big seed-starting contraption (full-spectrum lights rigged by ropes to be lowered and raised as necessary, warming pads, a tangle of extension cords I would enjoy working with about as much as changing a tire). And I've laid the first babies  --  I mean, seeds  --  into their flats. With not much else to do but wait for germination, we are headed out for a hike on this glorious day, with our little filly on a lead in tow. Maybe there will be daffodils. Or inspiration for the next blog out there somewhere, along the way.

On Blog Time

I keep having this recurring vision of a crawling baby churning her way into a lush, dark forest alone. Light has followed rain and lifted everything, given the forest a static singing spirit just beyond human perception, what the angels' voices would do if the light were manifest in sound. The baby is vulnerable, a peach, achingly bare except for a cloth diaper that’s wet and half falling off. Something shiny has attracted her, dust motes in stripes of white sun maybe, and she has shot off like an arrow to find it. She sits to rest sometimes, babbling nonsense and hiccoughing in blissful ignorance of what could lie ahead. Then she continues her hunt. Something is in there somewhere; she saw it. She has no word for "sure" to form the feeling on her tongue, but she is sure. Something is there.

I can’t scoop her up so I remind myself it’s a good thing babies have that bizarro skin on their knees, that lets them slice through polypropylene fiber or forest floors without suffering the nasty rash known as “rug burn.” This infant is years away from finding out what that is, the hard way.

The baby is me. The forest is the blogosphere. And if I am not careful, I may find myself raised up by wolves.

* * *

Part of me, the grownup me that is, wishes I could re-form the image to have more broad appeal, that I was not so damned Classic Cancer, the sign of mother and moon  --  but I’m working on Blog Time here. Tick tick. This is the obligatory Blog About Blogging. Birds gotta fly; fish gotta swim; eventually, all writers gotta write about writing. Plays will be made about making plays; there will be television sitcoms about making television sitcoms.

A long Facebook thread begun by a friend made it impossible for me to ignore the topic any longer. Most everyone in the thread is or was a blogger, real deals, with strong media backgrounds and quality products, from what I saw  --  I looked at others' blogs for the very first time. These friends were, essentially, crying in their beers over the already declared dead blogosphere, and I was the newbie "just hired on," taking it easy on the beer as the new kid should. By the end of the discussion I had backed up in time to the aforementioned baby.

Here’s what this writer with precisely zero experience with blogs prior to now learned. The blogosphere is big. It is complicated to do it correctly. It breaks hearts. No kidding, someone said that  --  "it will break your heart."

I think I understand where they're coming from, when they express pain about it. For one, it may have provided brief hope of actually making a living by writing, as many of these friends once did. And we with print journalism backgrounds were used to counting readers in the tens of thousands once  --  even if you worked at the smallest of newspapers and correctly supposed only a fraction of the readership laid eyes on your work, the numbers probably were still in the tens of thousands. (Young whippersnappers. Remember few other media devices were distracting subscribers, once upon a time.)

Admittedly, I had done the briefest internet homework on the topic before I started writing here, to figure out what it was I was "supposed to do." Learn how to "ping" for one thing, whatever that is. Write short pieces, the shorter the better. And absolutely  --  it's a rule buddy  --  allow comments.

What? Since when do writers engage the conversation, beyond putting their best effort into beginning one, and then having the courage to let their complete work stand on its own? I'm not so much of a babe in the woods that I don't know  --  I would look at those comments, maybe get into the fray. They would affect my work, shift the course of future work. That's crazy talk, man, the antithesis of what writing is for.

Ah, the biggest heartbreak of all:  the loss of the complete thought, of writers who can have one, of readers who can wait for one and then just take it and think about it. Without mass discussion, without argument before the "thinking" part. These losses are worth crying in your beer over.

 

But in my final analysis, I find I am so glad I was that baby who keeps popping into my head, when I began this writing again, in earnest. I am glad for the wonder. I am having so much fun, reaching for something so luminously beautiful, whether I successfully catch it or not. Words  --  dust motes in stripes of white sun. With no other expectation, my skin is plenty thick enough, for that particular kind of journey into the forest.

Sniper Fire

I am tapping a finger to my chin. The sickle-shaped claws of my mind are extending and retracting, slowly  --  an unknowing flap of feathers has drawn their attention and made them ready to sever something as if of their own accord. I am weighing words like gun powder, harmless enough in the wind or on the scale, but in skillful hands, capable of delivering mortal wounds.

To write, or not to write, about the most despicable woman I ever knew?

She is perfection for my purposes, for the mission of this blog, which  --  you may not know up to now  --  is purely my attempt to exercise old writing muscles. Peaceful farmscapes and the unexpected hijinks of the animals are safe fodder for meeting some sort of regular schedule, sure as sunrises and puppies to deliver words and chuckles. Trust me, they will be back, but this space has the equivalent of a movie's NC-17 rating  --  for its uncertainty of topics not even imagined yet and so impossible to classify for the reader in advance.

How delicious then, to have this character from more than a decade in my past come back into view. My grown daughters were in a stream-of-consciousness banter when they landed on the memory of this woman, an "authority figure" from their childhoods, and burst into laughter.

See her:  a bouncing spill of blond curls, the hairstyle sometimes long and sometimes short but otherwise never changing in her nearly 50 years. (She discovered a long time ago the value of the blond flounce  --  the effervescent flag whipping in the wind of the male periphery.) The only other innate physical attribute worth mentioning is the one that magnetizes some women to her side, so in awe are they of an impossibly diminutive figure. This she has covered in a dark, fake tan and flashy jewelry; horse teeth she learned from a young age to handle by hiding them in plain sight. Smile big, smile often, and perhaps people will think they're just another set of cubic zirconia adornments.

So diminutive and blond, she speed walks (honing in on victims like a bullet) and ticks her butt from side to side, enough to notice, but not so much that anyone could with perfect confidence call into question her motives. (She has found a church where good manners and good intentions allow grace for a broad expression of such "gifts.") Feigning innocence, she blurts in front of groups whatever is most likely to hurt or embarrass or make a timid person cry.

"How dare you tell everyone here your dream about walking on the ocean floor  --  Mary here had a child die of drowning 10 years ago!"

"You know, according to Leviticus a birthmark like the one your baby has is the sign of the devil."

"NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO!" (Interrupting a solemn ritual and marching herself through the crowd, to accost one individual. A woman, of course.) "You are supposed to be focused on Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior, and it doesn't matter that you got cold. Take off that coat!"

Group IQs can be gleaned by whether a table full of partygoers leans in toward her as she approaches, or away. Intelligent, confident, or talented people fall away from her like rich people from a smelly beggar  --  you will not see them in her close company. But imagine the women who join the bullet of her to become the "Church Torpedo," as I call them collectively, fanning out behind her as she moves to keep other women in line. Horse Teeth leads the charge, cornering a lone female not to her liking, and doing all the talking:

"You say you don't love your husband? You've filed for divorce from a good, God-fearing man? Well let me tell you what you need to do. You need to get your ass home and give that man a good country fucking. Right girls? Am I right?"

*  *  *

To write, or not to write, about the most despicable woman I ever knew? You see the dilemma. What a great character for someone who is exercising her writing muscles. But it is also true that words are capable of delivering mortal wounds, sometimes most worryingly, to the reputations of their writers. One could be seen as jealous, petty, the pathetic victim in a given scenario. Even if the writer could successfully protest, but not too much, that she is none of those things in a certain case, just an observer, don't negative sentiments reflect most of all on the person who has them?

What to do, what to do.

I'll be sure to let you know what I decide.